The steady fall in abortion deaths during the 20th century leveled off for some reason during the 1950s. Women continued to benefit from the medical advances in antibiotics and blood transfusions, so deaths did not return to levels before those developments.
A snapshot of what abortion mortality numbers were like during the late 1950s and early 1960s can be found in "Abortion Deaths in California," by Leon Parrish Fox, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on July 1, 1967
From August 1957 through December, 1965, the five District Maternal Study Committees in California counted a total of 223 abortion deaths (criminal, miscarriages, and undetermined). With California accounting for 323,944 of 1,330,414 reported abortions in 1993 (24%), we can estimate that California likewise accounted for roughly 24% of criminal abortions before legalization.
If claims of 5,000 to 10,000 maternal deaths from criminal abortion alone were correct, California should have been counting 1,200 to 2,400 maternal deaths from criminal abortions alone per year, not including miscarriages.
If California accounted for about 24% criminal abortions, we'd have been seeing 125 deaths from all abortions annually in the United States during the period 1957 to 1965. When you consider that the official toll fell from 260 in 1957 to 90 (total legal, criminal, miscarriages, and undetermined) in 1972, 125 deaths per year in that time period seems pretty accurate.
In spite of the leveling off in numbers, I have been unable to find as many women's stories during the 1950s due to a fall in popularity of abortion deaths as news stories.
I am also unable to determine why lay abortionists are becoming disproportionately represented in abortion cases in the 1950s, since public health researchers found that women were finding physician-abortionists roughly 90% of the time. This might be due to shifting attitudes toward abortion which made law enforcement more hesitant to prosecute physicians for abortion deaths than they had been in previous decades.
space
A question mark (?) after
a person's name
indicates that there can
be some question of
whether the person
actually perpetrated the
abortion.
This would include cases
in which a person died
prior to trial, a case
never made it to trial, a
person won a new
trial on appeal, or a
person was acquitted
but I have been
unable to determine why.
In many cases, an
acquittal does not mean
that the person did not
perform the abortion.
In some cases the
jury might have decided
that the abortion was
actually performed
legally and thus the
woman's death was
accident, not homicide.
A snapshot of what abortion mortality numbers were like during the late 1950s and early 1960s can be found in "Abortion Deaths in California," by Leon Parrish Fox, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology on July 1, 1967
From August 1957 through December, 1965, the five District Maternal Study Committees in California counted a total of 223 abortion deaths (criminal, miscarriages, and undetermined). With California accounting for 323,944 of 1,330,414 reported abortions in 1993 (24%), we can estimate that California likewise accounted for roughly 24% of criminal abortions before legalization.
If claims of 5,000 to 10,000 maternal deaths from criminal abortion alone were correct, California should have been counting 1,200 to 2,400 maternal deaths from criminal abortions alone per year, not including miscarriages.
If California accounted for about 24% criminal abortions, we'd have been seeing 125 deaths from all abortions annually in the United States during the period 1957 to 1965. When you consider that the official toll fell from 260 in 1957 to 90 (total legal, criminal, miscarriages, and undetermined) in 1972, 125 deaths per year in that time period seems pretty accurate.
In spite of the leveling off in numbers, I have been unable to find as many women's stories during the 1950s due to a fall in popularity of abortion deaths as news stories.
I am also unable to determine why lay abortionists are becoming disproportionately represented in abortion cases in the 1950s, since public health researchers found that women were finding physician-abortionists roughly 90% of the time. This might be due to shifting attitudes toward abortion which made law enforcement more hesitant to prosecute physicians for abortion deaths than they had been in previous decades.
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
* The Colonial Era
space
space
space
space
A question mark (?) after
a person's name
indicates that there can
be some question of
whether the person
actually perpetrated the
abortion.
This would include cases
in which a person died
prior to trial, a case
never made it to trial, a
person won a new
trial on appeal, or a
person was acquitted
but I have been
unable to determine why.
In many cases, an
acquittal does not mean
that the person did not
perform the abortion.
In some cases the
jury might have decided
that the abortion was
actually performed
legally and thus the
woman's death was
accident, not homicide.